Ghosts of the Shadow Market

by Cassandra Clare

  “What’s wrong?” Jem said. “Is it Rosemary? I can’t help but feel her death is on my shoulders.”

  “No!” Tessa insisted. “We did everything we could for her. We’re still doing everything we can—Kit is safe, for the moment, and hopefully the Riders of Mannan still have no idea he exists. Maybe the Unseelie Court will consider their job done.”

  “Maybe,” Jem said dubiously. They both knew it was unlikely to end here, but at least they’d bought Kit some time. “I wish we could do more for him. No child should have to see his father murdered.”

  Tessa took his hand. She knew exactly what Jem was thinking about—not just all the orphans scattered through the Shadowhunter world who’d watched their parents cut down in the Dark War, but his own parents, tortured and killed before his eyes. Jem had told no one but Tessa and Will the full horror he’d endured at the hands of that demon, and telling the story even once was almost more than he could stand.

  “He’s in good hands,” Tessa assured him. “He’s got a Carstairs by his side. Emma will help him find a new family, as we did with Charlotte, Henry, and Will.”

  “And each other,” Jem said.

  “And each other.”

  “It won’t be a replacement for what he’s lost, though.”

  “No. But you can never replace what you’ve lost, can you?” Tessa said. “You can only find new love to fill the void left behind.”

  As always, the memory of Will sat between them, his absence a presence.

  “We both learned that lesson too young,” Jem said, “but I suppose everyone learns it eventually. Loss is what it means to be human.”

  Tessa started to say something—then burst into tears. Jem wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight against the racking sobs. Smoothed her hair, rubbed her back, waited for the storm to pass. Her pain was his pain, even when he didn’t understand its source. “I’m here,” he whispered. “I’m with you.”

  Tessa took a deep, shuddering breath, then met his gaze.

  “What is it?” he asked. “You can tell me anything.”

  “It’s . . . it’s you.” She touched his face gently. “You’re with me now, but you won’t always be. That’s what it means to be human, like you said. Eventually I’ll lose you. Because you’re mortal, and I’m . . . me.”

  “Tessa . . .” There were no words to say what he needed to say, that his love for her stretched beyond time, beyond death, that he had spent too much time these last few days imagining his own world without her, that even unfathomable loss could be survived, that they would love each other for as long as they could—so instead, he held her tight, let her feel his arms sturdy and sure around her, physical evidence: I am here.

  “Why now?” he asked gently. “Is it something Brother Enoch said?”

  “Maybe I didn’t realize how much I’d shut myself away from humanity all those years in the Spiral Labyrinth,” she admitted. “You fought in the War, you saw so much violence, so much death, but I was hiding—”

  “You were fighting,” Jem corrected her. “In your way, which was as essential as mine.”

  “I was fighting. But I was also hiding. I didn’t want to be fully in the world until you could be there too. And now, I suppose, I’m waking up to being fully human again. Which is terrifying, especially now.”

  “Tessa, why now?” he said again, alarm growing. What could Brother Enoch have told her to send her into this kind of spiraling panic?

  Tessa took his palm and pressed it flat against her stomach. “The reason I had so much trouble Changing back to myself is that I’m not only myself right now.”

  “You mean . . . ?” He was almost afraid to hope.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “Really?” He felt like a live wire, the idea of it, a baby, lighting his synapses on fire. He had never let himself hope for this, because he knew better than anyone how difficult it had been for Tessa, watching her children age as she did not. She had been a wonderful mother, she had loved being a mother, but he knew what it had cost her. He’d always assumed she would never want to endure that again.

  “Really. Diapers, strollers, playdates with Magnus and Alec, assuming we can persuade Magnus to wait a few years before he starts training our child to blow things up, the whole nine yards. So . . . what do you think?”

  Jem felt like his heart would burst. “I’m happy. I’m—‘happy’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. But you . . .” He examined her expression carefully. He knew her face better than his own, could read it like one of Tessa’s beloved books, and he read now: terror, longing, sorrow, and most of all, joy. “You’re happy too?”

  “I didn’t think I could ever feel this way again,” Tessa said. “There was a time when I thought there was no more joy left to me. And now . . .” Her smile blazed like the sun. “Why do you look so surprised?”

  He didn’t know how to say it without hurting her, making the pain fresh again by reminding her of her loss—but of course, she could read his face just as well as he could read hers. “Yes,” said Tessa. “I might lose them someday. As I’ll lose you. I can’t bear the thought of it.”

  “Tessa—”

  “But we bear so much that seems unthinkable. The only truly unbearable burden is living without love. You taught me that.” She laced her fingers through his, squeezed tight. She was so unimaginably strong. “You and Will.”

  Jem cupped her face in his hands, felt her skin warm against his palms, and felt grateful all over again for the life that had been returned to him. “We’re having a child?”

  Tessa’s eyes shone. The tears had stopped, and in their wake was a look of fierce determination. Jem knew what it had cost her to lose Will, then to lose the family she’d built with him. Jem had lost a piece of himself when his parabatai died; Will’s absence had left behind a void that nothing could fill. There was, all these years later, still pain. But the pain was evidence of love, was a reminder of Will.

  It was easier not to feel. It was safer not to love. It was possible to make oneself silent and still as stone, to wall oneself off from the world and its losses, to empty one’s heart. It was possible, but it was not human.

  It was not worth losing the chance to love. He had learned this from the Silent Brotherhood and, before that, from Tessa. And before that, of course, from Will. They had both tried so hard to hide from the pain of future loss, to stay solitary, safe from the dangers of connection. They had failed so beautifully.

  “We’re having a child,” Tessa echoed him. “I hope you’re ready to give up sleep for a few years.”

  “Fortunately, I’ve got plenty of practice at that,” he reminded her. “Less so when it comes to diapers.”

  “I hear they’re much improved since the last time I needed them,” Tessa said. “We’ll have to figure it out together. All of it.”

  “You’re sure?” Jem said. “You want to take all this on yourself again?”

  She smiled like Raphael’s Madonna. “The nappies, the sleepless nights, the endless crying, the love like you’ve never imagined was possible, like your heart is living on the outside of your body? The chaos and the fear and the pride and the chance to tuck someone in and read them to sleep? To do all of that with you? I couldn’t be more sure.”

  He took her in his arms then, imagining the life growing inside of her and the future they would have together, a family, more love to fill the absences left by those they’d lost, more love than either of them had ever imagined still possible. The future was so precarious, shadowed by a looming danger neither of them fully understood, and Jem wondered what kind of world his child would be born into. He thought of all the blood that had been shed these last few years, the growing sense among the Shadowhunters he knew that something dark was rising, that this Cold Peace after the war might be only the eerie calm at the eye of the hurricane, those still, silent moments in which it was possible to deceive yourself into imagining the worst was over.

  He and Tessa had been alive too long to
deceive themselves, and he thought about what might happen to a child born at the eye of such a storm. He thought about Tessa, her will and her strength, her refusal to let loss after loss harden her against love, her refusal to hide any longer from the brutality of the mortal world, her determination to fight, to hold on.

  She too had been a child born of storms, he thought, as had he, as had Will. All three had risen in love through their struggles to find happiness—and without the struggle, would the happiness have been so great?

  He closed his eyes and pressed a kiss to Tessa’s hair. Behind his lids, he did not see darkness but the light of a London morning and Will there, smiling at him. A new soul made of you and Tessa, Will said. I can hardly wait to meet such a paragon.

  “Do you see him too?” Tessa whispered.

  “I see him,” Jem said, and he held her even more tightly against him, the new life they had created together between them.

  The Lost World

  By Cassandra Clare and Kelly Link

  The world and everything in it had changed . . . people passed me as I sat—people who laughed and joked and gossiped. It seemed to me that I watched them almost as a dead man might watch the living.

  —Arthur Conan Doyle, The Fate of the Evangeline

  2013

  “So you didn’t sense any kind of demonic energy or other kind of supernatural emanation from the tarn?” Ty asked.

  It was March, and outside the Scholomance the world was wintry white, as if all the Carpathian Mountains were in mourning. Ty was writing at his desk, in the black notebook where for six months he had been keeping a record of the side effects, benefits, and discoverable qualities of Livvy’s resurrected state.

  Early entries ran along the lines of Incorporeal. Invisible to all with some exceptions. Some animals appear to sense her. Most cats, for example, though cannot entirely be sure since cats do not talk. Can, with some effort, make herself invisible to me. Have asked her not to do this. Find it worrying. Does not sleep. Does not need food. Says she believes it is possible she can taste things that I (Ty) eat. Will test this—Livvy wait in other room while I taste various foods—but not the most pressing of experiments, and there is the question of whether or not this is entirely related to Livvy’s current state or whether it is due to being twins or the undeniable fact that I have made all of this happen. Magnus says there is very little reliable information. Sense of smell unimpaired. Tested her on clean and dirty socks as well as various herbs. Insensible to extremes of heat or cold. Says that she is happy to be here with me. Says that she loves me and wishes to stay with me. Proof, can we assume, that some things (some emotions or relationships) survive the grave?

  “No?” Livvy said. Often, while Ty wrote, she hovered at his shoulder, to see what he wrote down and to qualify his notes with her own observations. But at the moment, she was more interested in something she had discovered carved into the wall just below the headboard of Ty’s bed. If she made an effort, she could push herself through the wooden headboard, just like a ghost in one of Dru’s movies, who could walk through walls. How she would have liked to show off this ability to her sister—but she and Ty had agreed that she should not manifest in front of the rest of their family.

  Behind the headboard of Ty’s dorm-issue bed, the tops of letters just faintly visible, someone had gouged a rough sentence into the wall, and a date. “ ‘I did not choose this life,’ ” Livvy said out loud.

  “What?” Ty said, sounding startled.

  “Oh,” Livvy said hastily. “That’s not an observation, Ty. It’s something that someone carved here on the wall. There’s a year, too. ‘1904.’ But no name.”

  Ty had been at the Scholomance for four months now. And where Ty went, Livvy went too. Four months at the Scholomance, and six months since Livvy had come back as a ghost when the catalyst Ty was using in his attempt to resurrect her had failed him, and the spell from the Black Volume of the Dead had gone awry. At first Livvy had not been entirely herself. There were pages in Ty’s notebook about the gaps in her memory, the ways in which she did not seem to be the same person. But, gradually, she had come back to herself. Ty had written in his notebook: Jet lag, when one travels between coasts or countries and experiences a change in time zones, is part of the human condition. It is possible that Livvy is experiencing some version of this. A writer once called Death “that unknown country.” Presumably Livvy had to travel, at least psychically, quite far to come back to me.

  All in all, the last few months had been a time of great and alarming changes—Livvy’s ghostly return from the dead had been neither the greatest nor the most alarming. The Cohort and their supporters were now shut off in Idris, while supporters of the Clave had been exiled to all the corners of the globe. No one could get into Idris and none could get out. “What do you think they’re eating?” Ty had asked Livvy. “Each other, hopefully,” Livvy replied. “Or zucchini. Lots of zucchini.” She felt sure that no one honestly enjoyed zucchini.

  The Scholomance, too, had changed. Historically it was the institution where Centurions were trained, and Livvy had heard the Centurions who descended on the L.A. Institute speak of the place. It had become a recruiting ground for the Cohort, and it had sounded thoroughly horrible. Those Cohort sympathizers were now in Idris, and that was no great loss as far as Livvy could see. Every member of the Cohort she had ever met had been a bully, a bigot, or a petty-minded bootlicker. The zucchini of the Shadowhunter world. Who missed them? The real problem now was not that they were gone but that they were not gone enough. There they were, lurking inside the wards of Idris, planning and plotting only the Angel knew what.

  Some of the Scholomance’s instructors had gone to Idris with the Centurions, and now Jia Penhallow, the former Consul, was in charge here. She’d decided to step down as Consul so that she could have time to rest, but once her health improved, she wanted something useful to do. Her husband, Patrick, was with her, and Ragnor Fell had stepped in too, to teach and offer guidance. Catarina Loss was a frequent presence as well. She spent more time at the new Academy on Luke Garroway’s farm in upstate New York, but she would stop by the Scholomance now and then to restock the infirmary or heal unusual magical maladies.

  There were other changes. Kit had gone off to live with Jem and Tessa, while Helen and Aline were now ensconced at the Los Angeles Institute. Livvy wished with all of her ghostly heart that she and Ty could have stayed in Los Angeles, but Ty had been adamant. Going off to the Scholomance was the penance he must endure for his great crime—the great crime of attempting to bring Livvy back. Not very flattering, Livvy thought, to now be the ghostly albatross that Ty wore around his neck, but better a ghostly albatross than simply a dead sister.

  Ty said, “No one chooses this life.” He had put down his pen.

  He sounded as if he were somewhere far away. Livvy didn’t think he was talking about the Scholomance.

  She said hastily, “I saw animal tracks around Dimmet Tarn. It isn’t fully iced over—I heard some of the other students say that this year is warmer than any on record. Can you imagine more snow than we’ve had? It looks as if animals come down to drink from Dimmet Tarn. I wonder what they are.”

  “A Carpathian lynx, perhaps,” Ty said. “They are supposed to haunt the area.”

  “Same,” Livvy said. But Ty didn’t laugh at her joke.

  He said, “You were away for nearly three hours. I noted it in the book. I felt as if some part of me was falling asleep. Pins and needles.”

  Livvy said, “I felt it too. Like a rubber band being stretched.”

  The past week, when Ty was not in classes, they had been experimenting with timed intervals in which Livvy moved progressively farther and farther away from Ty. Dimmet Tarn was only just past the Scholomance, less than a quarter of a mile away from Ty’s room, but it was the farthest Livvy had ventured. She’d hovered over the surface of the water for so long she had almost begun to feel hypnotized by the unmoving black stillness beneath her. She
had been able to see the reflection of leafless trees on the tarn, but no matter how close she pressed her face to the flat inky surface of the water, she had not been able to see herself. She could see her hand if she held it out, but not the reflection of her hand, and that had made her feel very strange. So instead she looked only at the water and tried to let go of all her unhappinesses and worries. The only thing to hold on to was Ty.

  So eventually she had withdrawn her attention from Dimmet Tarn and she had come back to him. She said, “I would have liked to see a Carpathian lynx.”

  “They’re endangered,” Ty said. “And very shy.”

  “And I am very invisible,” Livvy said. “So I feel my chances are quite good. But please mark down that Dimmet Tarn is quite an ordinary tarn. Those old stories, I think, must be only that. Stories.”

  “Further investigation required, let us say,” Ty said. “I will continue to do research in the library.”

  They had picked Dimmet Tarn as a destination for Livvy not only because the distance was a useful measure but because there were lots of interesting stories about Dimmet Tarn among the other students at the Scholomance. It had once been a place of great uncanniness, supposedly, but none of the stories were in agreement as to the nature of its uncanniness. Some stories said that it was once a place beloved of the faeries. Others said that there was a great clutch of demonic eggs far down at the bottom of the tarn, so deep down that no sounding rope could give a true measure. Another story said that an unhappy warlock had enchanted the water so that to swim in it would curse the swimmer with a toe fungus that eventually hatched miniature blue and green toadstools, which sounded improbable, but then warlocks were often improbably petty. It was one of the potential side effects of immortality. You got very bad at letting go of things.

  “Did you try to submerge yourself?” Ty asked.

  “Yes,” Livvy said. Much like pushing through a headboard, she had been able to push herself down into the water. It had been nothing like swimming had been back in Los Angeles, where the water was green or blue or gray, depending on the time of day and whether the sun was shining, and all the waves wore a cap of white froth and came rushing up noisily on the wet sand. Dimmet Tarn was black, utterly black, as black as night but without stars or moon or the promise that dawn would ever come. Black as tar, black as—nothingness.